by Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, Jeremie Zimmermann
Actually I’m reminded of a time when I smuggled myself into Sydney Opera House to see Faust. Sydney Opera House is very beautiful at night, its grand interiors and lights beaming out over the water and into the night sky. Afterwards I came out and I heard three women talking together, leaning on the railing overlooking the darkened bay. The older woman was describing how she was having problems with her job, which turned out to be working for the CIA as an intelligence agent, and she had previously complained to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence and so on, and she was telling this in hushed tones to her niece and another woman. I thought, “So it is true then. CIA agents really do hang out at the Sydney opera!” And then I looked inside the Opera House through the massive glass panels at the front, and there in all this lonely palatial refinement was a water rat that had crawled up in to the Opera House interior, and was scurrying back and forth, leaping on to the fine linen-covered tables and eating the Opera House food, jumping on to the counter with all the tickets and having a really great time. And actually I think that is the most probable scenario for the future: an extremely confining, homogenized, postmodern transnational totalitarian structure with incredible complexity, absurdities and debasements, and within that incredible complexity a space where only the smart rats can go.
That’s a positive angle on the negative trajectory, the negative trajectory being a transnational surveillance state, drone-riddled, the networked neo-feudalism of the transnational elite—not in a classical sense, but a complex multi-party interaction that has come about as a result of various elites in their own national countries lifting up together, off their respective population bases, and merging. All communications will be surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new Establishment, from birth to death. That’s a major shift from even ten years ago and we’re already practically there. I think that can only produce a very controlling atmosphere. If all the collected information about the world was public that might rebalance the power dynamic and let us, as a global civilization, shape our destiny. But without dramatic change it will not. Mass surveillance applies disproportionately to most of us, transferring power to those in on the scheme who nonetheless, I think, will not enjoy this brave new world much either. This system will also coincide with a drones arms race that will eliminate clearly defined borders as we know them, since such borders are produced by the contestation of physical lines, resulting in a state of perpetual war as the winning influence-networks start to shake down the world for concessions. And alongside this people are going to just be buried under the impossible math of bureaucracy.
How can a normal person be free within that system? They simply cannot, it’s impossible. Not that anyone can ever be completely free, within any system, but the freedoms that we have biologically evolved for, and the freedoms that we have become culturally accustomed to, will be almost entirely eliminated. So I think the only people who will be able to keep the freedom that we had, say, twenty years ago—because the surveillance state has already eliminated quite a lot of that, we just don’t realize it yet—are those who are highly educated in the internals of this system. So it will only be a high-tech rebel elite that is free, these clever rats running around the opera house.
ENDNOTES
1. Put simply, cryptography, from the Greek for “secret writing,” is the practice of communicating in code.
2. “Oxford English Dictionary Updates Some Entries & Adds New Words; Bada-Bing, Cypherpunk, and Wi-Fi Now in the OED,” ResourceShelf, September 16, 2006: http://web.resourceshelf.com/go/resourceblog/43743 (accessed October 24, 2012).
3. WikiLeaks: http://wikileaks.org
4. For more on the rubberhose file see: “The Idiot Savants’ Guide to Rubberhose,” Suelette Dreyfus: http://marutukku.org/current/src/doc/maruguide/t1.html (accessed October 14, 2012).
5. For more on the book Underground see: http://www.underground-book.net
For more on the movie Underground: The Julian Assange Story see the Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2357453/ (accessed October 21, 2012).
6. Noisebridge is a San Francisco-based hackerspace, an infrastructure provider for technical-creative projects, collaboratively run by its members: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge
Chaos Computer Club Berlin is the Berlin organization of the Chaos Computer Club (for which see below): https://berlin.ccc.de/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club_Berlin
7. Tor Project: https://www.torproject.org
8. The Chaos Computer Club is Europe’s largest hacker association. Its activities range from technical research and exploration to campaigns, events, publications and policy advice: http://www.ccc.de
9. EDRI: http://www.edri.org
10. ICANN: http://www.icann.org
11. buggedplanet: http://buggedplanet.info
12. Cryptophone: http://www.cryptophone.de
13. La Quadrature du Net: http://www.laquadrature.net
14. Collateral Murder: http://www.collateralmurder.com
The Iraq War Logs: http://wikileaks.org/irq
The Afghan War Diary: http://wikileaks.org/afg
Cablegate: http://wikileaks.org/cablegate.html
15. “Congressional committee holds hearing on national security leak prevention and punishment,” Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, July 11, 2012: http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/congressional-committee-holds-hearing-national-security-leak-prevent (accessed October 21, 2012).
16. For further information on the WikiLeaks Grand Jury consult freelance journalist Alexa O’Brien’s timeline: http://www.alexaobrien.com/timeline_us_versus_manning_assange_wikileaks_2012.html (accessed October 22, 2012).
17. “Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules,” Guardian, March 12, 2012: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-manning-cruel-inhuman-treatment-un (accessed October 24, 2012).
18. “WikiLeaks: guilty parties “should face death penalty,” ” Telegraph, December 1, 2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8172916/WikiLeaks-guilty-parties-should-face-death-penalty.html (accessed October 22, 2012).
19. “CIA launches task force to assess impact of U.S. cables’ exposure by WikiLeaks,” Washington Post, December 22, 2012: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122104599.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2010122105304 (accessed October 22, 2012).
20. “WikiLeaks fights to stay online after US company withdraws domain name,” Guardian, December 3, 2012: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-knocked-off-net-dns-everydns (accessed October 23, 2012).
21. “Don’t Look, Don’t Read: Government Warns Its Workers Away From WikiLeaks Documents,” New York Times, December 4, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/05restrict.html?hp&_r=2& (accessed October 23, 2012).
22. “Banking Blockade,” WikiLeaks: http://www.wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html (accessed October 22, 2012)
23. Jacob’s written account of his detentions is recommended reading. See: “Air Space—a trip through an airport detention center,” boingboing, October 31, 2011: http://boingboing.net/2011/10/31/air-space-a-trip-through-an-ai.html.
Also of importance is an interview with Jacob about the detentions on Democracy Now. “National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance,” Democracy Now, April 20, 2012: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william (both links accessed October 23, 2012).
24. The case is officially known as In the Matter of the 2703(d) Order Relating to Twitter Accounts: Wikileaks Rop_G IOERROR; and BirgittaJ.
25. “Secret orders target email,” Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2011: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576613284007315072.html (accessed October 22, 2012).
26. “Twitter Ordered to Yield Data in WikiLeaks Case,” New York Times, Nove
mber 10, 2011: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/technology/twitter-ordered-to-yield-data-in-wikileaks-case.html?_r=1 (accessed October 22, 2012).
27. “ACLU & EFF to Appeal Secrecy Ruling in Twitter/WikiLeaks Case,” Electronic Frontier Foundation press release, January 20, 2012: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/aclu-eff-appeal-secrecy-ruling-twitterwikileaks-case (accessed October 22, 2012).
28. This was the April 6, 2008 protest in support of the suppressed strike of the Mahalla al-Kobra textile workers. Shortly before the strike the “April 6 Youth Movement” was formed as a Facebook group, conceived to encourage Egyptians to hold protests in Cairo and elsewhere to coincide with the industrial action in Mahalla. The protests did not go to plan, and the Facebook group’s administrators Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed Rashid and Ahmed Maher were arrested, along with others. Maher was tortured for his Facebook password. The April 6 Youth Movement went on to play a role in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. See “Cairo Activists Use Facebook to Rattle Regime,” Wired, October 20, 2008: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_facebookegypt?currentPage=all (accessed October 23, 2012).
29. “How to Protest Intelligently,” anonymous authors, distributed at the outset of the eighteen-day uprising that removed President Mubarak (Arabic): http://www.itstime.it/Approfondimenti/EgyptianRevolutionManual.pdf. Excerpts from the document were translated into English and published as, “Egyptian Activists’ Action Plan: Translated,” Atlantic, January 27, 2011: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/egyptian-activists-action-plan-translated/70388 (both links accessed October 23, 2012).
30. The Panopticon was a prison devised by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1787, designed so as to allow one prison guard to covertly surveil all prisoners at once via line of sight. Jeremy Bentham (edited by Miran Bozovic), The Panopticon Writings, (Verso, 1995), available online at: http://cartome.org/panopticon2.htm (accessed October 22, 2012).
31. Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) was a German blacksmith who invented mechanical movable type printing, an invention that gave rise to some of the most significant social upheaval in history. The invention of the printing press is the closest historical analogue to the invention of the internet.
32. John Gilmore is one of the original cypherpunks, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a civil liberties activist. The phrase cited by Andy was first quoted in: “First Nation in Cyberspace,” Time Magazine, December 6, 1993. See John Gilmore’s site: http://www.toad.com/gnu (accessed October 22, 2012).
33. “Proprietary technologies are any types of systems, tools, or technical processes that are developed by and for a specific business entity… [T]he ideas developed and submitted by employees are usually considered the intellectual property of the employer, thus allowing them to qualify as proprietary technology.” Definition taken from wiseGEEK: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-proprietary-technology.htm (accessed October 22, 2012).
34. Cory Doctorow, “The coming war on general-purpose computing,” boingboing, January 10, 2012 (based on a keynote speech delivered to the Chaos Computer Congress, December 2011): http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html (accessed October 15, 2012).
35. Stuxnet is a highly sophisticated computer worm widely believed to have been developed by the US and Israel to attack Siemens equipment allegedly used by Iran for uranium enrichment. For an overview of Stuxnet, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet.
See also, “WikiLeaks: US advised to sabotage Iran nuclear sites by German thinktank,” Guardian, January 18, 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/18/wikileaks-us-embassy-cable-iran-nuclear.
WikiLeaks carried one of the earliest reports of the effects now believed to have been a result of Stuxnet—the nuclear accident at Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. See, “Serious nuclear accident may lay behind Iranian nuke chief’s mystery resignation,” WikiLeaks, July 17, 2009: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Serious_nuclear_accident_may_lay_behind_Iranian_nuke_chief%27s_mystery_resignation.
Evidence from the global intelligence company Stratfor, leaked by WikiLeaks, suggests Israeli involvement. See Email ID 185945, The Global Intelligence Files: http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/185945_re-alpha-s3-g3-israel-iran-barak-hails-munitions-blast-in.html (all links accessed October 16, 2012).
36. Pentesting, short for penetration testing, is a security engineering term for conducting an attack in a legally authorized manner on a computer system or a computer network, as an unauthorized user might, in order to evaluate how secure it is. Security researchers are often recruited from the hacker community to conduct penetration testing on secure systems.
37. Capture the Flag is originally an outdoor game, normally involving two teams, where both teams hold a position and guard a flag. The objective is to capture the other team’s flag, and return it to base. At hacker conferences hackers play a computer-based version where teams attack and defend computers and networks.
38. Sysadmin Cup is a contraction of System Administrator Cup. A system administrator is a person working in the IT profession who maintains and operates a computer system or network. Jacob is saying that the exercise was like a tournament for system administrators.
39. “Aaron says encryption protects privacy, commerce,” USIS Washington File, October 13, 1998: http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1998/10/98101306_clt.html (accessed October 21, 2012).
40. Wassenaar Arrangement website: http://www.wassenaar.org (accessed October 21, 2012).
41. Andy is referring to various developments in the “First Crypto Wars” of the 1990s. When cypherpunk activists began to spread strong cryptographic tools as free software, the US administration took steps to prevent cryptographic tools being used effectively. It classified cryptography as a munition and restricted its export; it tried to introduce competing technologies that were deliberately broken so that law enforcement could always decrypt information; and it tried to introduce the controversial “key escrow” scheme. For a short period after the turn of the century it was widely accepted that these efforts had been comprehensively defeated. However, a “Second Crypto War” is now well underway, with legislative and technical efforts to backdoor or otherwise marginalize the use of cryptography.
42. The sample calculation was for the published 196.4 billion minutes of land-line calls in Germany in 2010, digitized with an 8 Kbps voice-codec, summing up to an amount of 11,784 Petabyte (Pb), rounded up with overhead to 15 Pb. Assuming rough storage costs of 500,000 USD (500 KUSD) for a Pb, that is 7.5 million USD or about 6 million EUR. Add costs for a decent data center setup, processing power, connections and man power. Even if all 101 billion minutes of mobile phone calls in Germany in 2010 are included, with another 50 Pb and 18.3 million EUR, the price is still less than a single military airplane like the Eurofighter (90 million EUR) or the F22 (150 million USD).
43. For more on VASTech see buggedplanet: http://buggedplanet.info/index.php?title=VASTECH (accessed October 21, 2012).
44. The NSA warrantless domestic surveillance scandal is the most consequential case of mass surveillance in United States history. The US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 1978 (FISA) made it illegal for US agencies to spy on US citizens without a warrant. After 9/11, the NSA began to engage in mass violations of FISA, authorized by a secret executive order of George W. Bush. The Bush administration claimed executive authority to do this under 2001 emergency legislation passed by Congress: The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), and the PATRIOT ACT. The NSA’s warrantless domestic spying program—which involved co-operation from private companies, including AT&T—remained secret until 2005, when it was exposed by the New York Times. See “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all.
Reporters for the New York Times had been contacted by an anonymous whistleblower who had leaked the existence of the warrantless surveillance program. In 2004 the then executive editor of the New York Times,
Bill Keller, agreed on the request of the Bush administration to withhold the story for a year, until after Bush was reelected. In 2005, the New York Times rushed to print the story when it learned of a possible Pentagon Papers-style prior restraint injunction being sought by the administration. The Bush administration denied that there was any illegality involved in the NSA program. The Justice Department launched an immediate investigation into the source of the leak, involving twenty-five federal agents and five prosecutors. Senior officials within the Republican Party called for the prosecution of the New York Times under the Espionage Act.
In the wake of the New York Times story other whistleblowers came forward to the press, gradually presenting a detailed picture of lawlessness and waste at the highest levels of the NSA. A host of class action lawsuits were taken by advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In one of these cases, ACLU v. NSA, the plaintiffs were denied standing because they could not prove that they had been personally spied on. In another, Hepting v. AT&T, an AT&T whistleblower, Mark Klein, came forward with an affidavit revealing the extent of AT&T’s cooperation with the domestic spying program. See the Hepting v. AT&T section on the EFF website: https://www.eff.org/cases/hepting.
Mark Klein was a witness in Hepting v. AT&T. An ex-employee of AT&T working in Folsom, San Francisco, his affidavit to the EFF in Hepting v. AT&T disclosed the existence of “Room 641A,” a strategic interception facility operated by AT&T for the NSA. The facility provided access to fiber optic trunks containing Internet backbone traffic, giving the capacity to engage in surveillance of all internet traffic passing through the building, both foreign and domestic. Another NSA whistleblower, William Binney, has estimated that there are as many as twenty such facilities, all placed at key points in the United States’ telecommunications network.
